About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

While I have already expressed my concerns commenting others’ posts, I believe it is time to tell it straight and loud. In my opinion GPLv3 got on stage too late, now there are simply too many stakeholders to take a decision like closing the GPL Loophole and SaaS could seriously prevent Free Software take over, more than anything else.

There are both popular and unpopular ways of circumventing the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License. A very unpopular method, we’ve come to find out, is via promises of patent protection for users of specific software. However, if you’re looking to leverage Free Software without completely fulfilling the requirements of the license, a better method would be to exploit the software as a service (SaaS) loophole, which the latest draft of the GPL3 just legalized.

I’d suggest that any license that attempts to close the SaaS Loophole is going to have an uphill battle. There’s too much code under GPLv2 (and maybe GPLv3 in the future) in use at large SaaS vendors and they’re not going to stand by while the loophole closes. *Or*, if they don’t get in the way of such a license, then these vendors will want the option of paying for the privilege of keeping their modifications private. Sun allows customers to do so with their openJDK project which is under GPLv2. This seems to be the only alternative that large SaaS vendors will accept…at least in my view.

my point of view comes from my past experience with the FSF community. I have been spending years as FSFE’s friend, and I firmly believe that GPLv3 in 2002 had much more chances to get closer to the Affero. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Richard is a GREAT man, but he did a big mistake, indeed.

Enterprises, or many of them, do love GPLv2 and now GPLv3. Even some OSS proponents as you pointed it out: OS business models based on SaaS make a lot of sense, as far as we can see. Right?! 😉